Iceland review - 2007, Page 67

ICELAND REVIEW 73
Behind the house is the small wood­fronted smoke house. With its thick stone
walls it looks almost like a natural feature distinct from, but part of, the landscape.
This is not true though. The old smoke house actually burnt down, and the new
one is “only” 60 to 70 years old. “I have been smoking for four years myself, but
my parents long before,” says Árnason. “My mother did it for maybe 40 years.”
As he opens the door, the cloud of strong smoke permeates the clothes and
provokes the senses to ask: what is it? It’s a rich, organic smell, but it’s certainly
not wood smoke.
Over the winter the sheep shed floor becomes obscured by a layer of com­
pacted straw and sheep dung. It is carefully removed in turf­like squares in the
spring and dried in the new and increasingly warm sunshine. Before long, the
squares lose their moisture, their ammoniac aroma and their bacteria. What’s
left is basically just a varied selection of plant matter, and the resultant smoke is
unique, surprisingly appealing and cheap. You could therefore argue that the
end product is basically sheep­smoked sheep.
Árnason smokes his hangikjöt for about a week and nearly all of it goes to
family and friends.
At the other end of the scale, Nordlenska hangikjöt is available under a variety
of brand names all over the country and it comes from Húsavík – one of Árnason’s
nearest towns, just 50 kilometers as the raven flies. A variety of smokes can be used
for hung meat, but perhaps surprisingly, the industrial scale Nordlenska plant also
opts for the traditional sheep poo smoke.
“We have calculated that over Christmastime every Icelander eats hangikjöt at
least once produced by Nordlenska,” says Ingvar Már Gíslason, Nordlenska’s
marketing manager. “Over Christmas we have around a 40 percent market share.”
The plastic­wrapped, industrially produced version totally lacks the love and
patience invested on the farm, and romantic images of burly farmers, woolly
pullovers and snowy fields are thin on the ground.
Preserving a national tradition and allowing everyone to enjoy it almost al­
ways involves a level of sacrifice. But the taste is authentic and the meat on the
Christ mas plate is rich, strong and deeply nostalgic to Icelandic souls, no matter
where it was smoked.
With electric lights, electric fires, shampooed dogs and synthetic fabrics, the
house­filling aroma of boiling hangikjöt is one of the few remaining rural smells
to be found in every home. It means Christmas. It means warmth and laughter.
Above all, it means home. Enjoy.